Saturday Night Live:25 Years of MusicA five-disc set

Saturday Night Live compliations have long been a hot video franchise for
producer Lorne Michaels. I was in my middle twenties for the first five years of
SNL and at the time it was the perfect show - sketch humor that made sense, irreverent jabs
at commercial television, and great music. The fact that it was all broadcast live was a guarantee
of value - just as with the Golden Age of Television, no retakes meant that we were seeing real
raw performances. I remember tuning in for the first time in 1976 (I guess I was a year late) and
seeing a new bunch of Muppets that didn't catch on. Madeline Kahn was
doing a spoof of I Feel Pretty from West Side Story, but dressed as the Bride of
Frankenstein.

This compilation represents well the years I watched, and might do the same for later
viewers of the long-running show. Each disc in the 5-volume set is about 83 minutes long, with
the musical guest spots interposed between chosen music-related skits. There are separate Music
and Sketch
menu pages to access each clip individually, which is helpful. The show uses guest hosts like Chevy
Chase and Martin Short to introduce each segment. They're mercifully brief, as the comedy patter ranges
from thin to obnoxious. But when the songs hit, it's nostalgia time. For many of us who didn't
tune in to the show for years at a time, it's nice to be able to put faces on performers previously
heard only on the radio.

Originally, each week's host introduced the featured musician or group, and the image would dissolve
right to the song, sometimes in the middle of the first bar of music. The editors of this compilation
cleverly use generic graphic 'bumpers' to jettison the original introducers and cover up the old
transitions, making the songs flow smoothly.

By and large, the accompanying skits are well chosen. Steve Martin's Disco Tut shows off
its terrific art direction and costumes, and
Gilda Radner does her wasted punk-rocker act; John Belushi imitates Ray Charles and Joe Cocker, and
Bill Murray sings Star Wars. Mick Jagger gets a lot of screen time, along with Wayne's World
segments involving Aerosmith and Madonna. Perhaps others will find a lot of goodies to be missing,
but I was surprised and pleased with what's here ... even though Madeline as the Bride was a no-show.

I didn't see a listing of the actual contents on the SNL site or anywhere else on the web,
so I transcribed them from the menus:

Lion's Gate's 5-disc SNL: 25 Years of Music has a great picture and a
really punchy audio track, as befits a performance-based disc. Although some of the video from
the early years shows its age, the color and detail is uniformly excellent. The nicely-designed
SNL performance setting always looks great, far better than when I tuned in live. A favorite
highlight is Neil Young's extended 1991 performance of Rockin' In the Free World, an
anti-Bush 1 and anti-Gulf War protest song. It now bounces back as a great anti-Bush 2,
anti-Terror Wars anthem.

Each disc could surely hold more content, but if keeping the volumes under 90 minutes each is what
allowed better encoding for pix and audio, there's no complaint from Savant. The only quibble is
a detail: the music behind the menus is much louder than the average program content, so skipping
around on the review disc was hard on the eardrums.

Savant can't comment on the packaging or its graphic layout & text, as the review was written from
unpackaged check discs.